Category: From the Old Server

Over breakfast at Hi-Rise Bakery in Harvard Square, I read the Wall Street Journal for the first time in many months.  Here’s what I learned…

International business is all about Asia these day, especially China.  New product ideas come from Japan.  New manufacturing plants are built in China.  Europe is mentioned only as a troublesome complainer in World Trade Organization talks, trying to prevent American, Canadian, and Australian firms from labeling wine as “Chablis” or cheese as “Roquefort”.

The editorial page has some really thoughtful witers, notably a former NASA employee saying that the Shuttle is NASA’s Vietnam.  It will never work because the reusable rocket idea is flawed, Homer Hickam notes, and the Shuttle is parked in the middle of a bunch of explosive rocketry rather than safely perched on top of all the nasty stuff.  “Simply put, had that spaceplane been on top of the stack, the destruction of Challenger and Columbia wouldn’t have occurred.”  He advocates replacing the Shuttle with expendable launchers and a new spaceplane.

The rest of the editorial page is devoted to right-wing gloating.  There is an article on how high-tax Democrat-controlled states such as California, Massachusetts, and New York lost population between 1995 and 2000 to Republican-controlled low-tax states such as Arizona, Nevada, Florida, the Carolinas, and Texas.  One reason cited for this migration is the high cost of housing in places such as LA or NYC.  But the author doesn’t explain why, if LA and NYC suck so badly, people are willing to pay $1 million for a tiny residence there…

A reader writes from Rhode Island to attack Howard Dean, a Democratic Party presidential candidate who proposes increased taxes and more ridistribution of income.  The reader, C. Dale Reis, notes that his parents could afford to support a family on a single income because taxes were low back around 1950.  Today, because taxes are so much higher, it takes two incomes to generate a middle-class lifestyle.

Our political system has turned the house and car every few years that my laborer father could afford into transfer payments from his bank account to the social system set up to buy votes for the politicians.  And what the middle class has gotten in return is the breakup of the traditional family and the resulting decline of our moral values.

Mr. Dean professes to care about “the children.” But it has been the increase in taxes over the past generation that has spawned latch-key suburban children, urban gangs, and overly aggressive toddlers coming out of day care.

One of the main editorials is about the latest statistics on SAT scores.  It seems that the black-white gap has grown quite a bit over the past 10 years.  A typical black student will score 206 points lower than a typical white student on the SATs.  Public schools are blamed, of course, with the suggestion that vouchers and school choice are the answer.  A study is cited where the conclusion is that “students who have roughly equal skills and knowledge will have roughly equal earnings”.  At first glance this seems reasonable.  You can’t cheat the marketplace forever, no matter how many layers of racial preferences are imposed by society.  On the other hand, look at all the business executives who earn fat salaries while remaining ignorant of all things related to making products, accounting, and other skills that were traditionally associated with managing a business.  If Carly Fiorina can rise to the top of HP, why can’t a black man get paid a fat salary despite a low level of knowledge and skill?  [One simple comprehensive explanation that the Journal does not consider is whether the racial quotas in colleges and graduate schools has something to do with it.  Why bother to study for standardized tests if you know that the color of your skin will guarantee you a spot in the college of your choice?]

Shifting over to the New York Times there is a fun article on Richard A. Grasso, the head of the New York Stock Exchange.  The Exchange itself doesn’t make that much in profit, only $28 million last year.  Grasso, however, decided to help himself to $12 million in annual salary, nearly half of the entire enterprise’s profits, and $140 million extra in “deferred savings and retirement benefits”.  The extra $140 mil, equivalent to about 5 years of profits for the NYSE, is held in a special account on which he is guaranteed at least an 8% annual return, risk-free.  That’s 10 times the interest rate that investors in money-market accounts are getting.

That’s all the news for today…

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Arrived back home in Cambridge, which gives me an opportunity to return the hated iPaq PocketPC to the much-loved Andrew (thanks!).  A printed-out list of addresses from Outlook would be far preferable to a device with only a few days of battery life (3 minutes per day of usage) and no battery level indicator.  My Handspring Treo with its broken door hinge was sitting on my desk.  It had been there unattended for one month.  The LCD screen was painted with an event reminder.  I touched “OK” and a series of other events came up.  The Treo had held its power for more than one month!

[One of my readers knows some of the folks at Handspring who are apparently taking pity on me and probably sending out a replacement Treo so I may not have to resort to pen and paper for too long.]

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A recent AP story talks about the increasing number of children dying after being left in sealed cars by mistake.  As a society we have 99% of the infrastructure necessary to prevent this.  Most newer cars have an alarm system and automatic climate control.  The alarm system implies a vibration sensor, a microphone (for glass breakage), and a little computer that is up and running all the time.  The automatic climate control implies an interior thermometer.

With a bit of programming the car can recognize that (a) someone is inside the car making noise and moving around a bit, and (b) that the temperature is climbing to an unsafe level (or getting too cold in the winter).  Now what?  If we had a wireless Internet for the price of $3 in chips the car would be able to send an instant message to the owner and the local police to come back and check the car.  (Of course you could do this now if you wanted to buy a $300/year cell phone subscription for the car, which is essentially what the GM OnStar system does, but most people wouldn’t be willing to pay the extra $300/year for something with such a low probability of ever being used.  Hence the need for a better national infrastructure.)

In an age where we spend infinite money and effort on high-tech cures that save a few lives it is a shame to see kids dying for want of a few lines of software and a $50 802.11 base station.

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We like to think that ours is a world where, for the first time, technological innovation in one corner of the globe can have repercussions many thousands of miles away.  Historians would beg to differ.  From The Prize:

“The local pearling trade had been Kuwait’s number-one industry and principal source of foreign earnings.  Whether or not he knew the name, Sheikh Ahmad [the owner of Kuwait at the time] had good reason to be intensely annoyed with a Japanese noodle vendor from Miye prefecture, one Kokichi Mikimoto, who had become obsessed with oysters and pearls and had devoted many difficult years to developing the technique for cultivating pearls artificially.  Eventually, Mikimoto’s efforts paid off, and by 1930 large volumes of Japanese cultured pearls were beginning to appear on the world’s jewelry markets, practically destroying the demand for the natural pearls that divers brought up from the waters off Kuwait. Kuwait’s economy was devastated; export earnings plummeted, merchants went bankrupt, boats were laid up onshore, and divers returned to the desert. … The little country faced a number of other economic dificulties [in the early 1930s].  The Great Depression had more generally crippled the economies of Kuwait and the other sheikhdoms. So bad had conditions become that slaveowners along the Arab coast were selling off their African slaves at a loss, to avoid the maintenance costs.”

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Adults have a tough time getting along with each other, especially when they are of opposite sexes and sharing a domicile. Most adults, however, are very happy to live with their children. High-income women in their 30s often put these two facts together and come up with intentional single motherhood. They find a sperm donor, spend nine months producing the baby “in-house”, then hire a nanny or two once the baby arrives.

Why can’t a man be more like a woman? What stops a high-income older man from hiring surrogate mothers to produce kids and an au pair or two to take care of them when he is at work or otherwise unavailable?

In the old days, of course, a mature man was not necessarily precluded from the standard marriage route. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man behind the Suez Canal, got married at the age of 64. To a woman of 20. They had 12 children. Today, however, except in some Third World countries, a woman of 20 is likely to prefer a young good-looking mate.

One potential obstacle to this approach to single fatherhood is that apparently American courts are not anxious to enforce surrogate motherhood contracts. For example, a woman could decide that she has grown attached to the baby that she has carried to term and elect to keep the baby. That isn’t so bad necessarily. A man could hire 3 surrogate mothers, expecting a yield of 2.2 delivered children. What if one surrogate repudiates the contract to hand over the baby. Can she then sue the father for paternity? Could that mournful situation be prevented if the man purchased donated eggs from one woman and hired an unrelated woman to handle the pregnancy?

And in an age of outsourcing Java coding, something for which many months of training are required, to the Third World, why not outsource surrogate motherhood? Suppose that a man has a budget of $50,000 per child. A smart healthy college-bound woman in the U.S. would probably reject that amount, only slightly more than the cost of one year at a top university. Consider, however, a woman with a good genetic patrimony in a country where the average income was $5,000 per year. Ten years of salary for 9 months of work! A bit of labor (literally) today and enough capital to buy a house and perhaps start a business. Perhaps that $50,000 is beginning to sound attractive. Not to mention all the other advantages of production in a foreign country. Obstetrical care and hospital fees are vastly cheaper in any country other than in the U.S.

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After a month traveling, I’ve concluded that the best way to lose weight is by eating every meal at McDonald’s.

Suppose that you go to a Whole Foods-style supermarket, at which all manner of incredibly delicious gourmet items are for sale. You spend $200 to stock the fridge. But really you ought to eat all the fruits, vegetables, and prepared foods while they are fresh. The result: massive gluttony and weight gain.

Suppose that you go to a reasonably nice restaurant, costing $20-30 per person. The menu will list an incredibly tempting array of food. It all sounds so great that you order an appetizer and a main dish. You have a tough time deciding among the main dishes and you’re sad that you can’t order two. The appetizer is actually big enough that you are beginning to feel full when the main dish comes. The main dish is heroic in size, the kind of feast that Homer describes the heroes at Troy as having consumed. You’re not really all that hungry but you ordered it so you feel like you should eat at least half. The result: massive gluttony and weight gain.

Eat at home or eat at a restaurant. Either way you get fat.

The solution is McDonald’s. If you can remember one piece of medical advice from my brother (“Don’t eat anything a caveman wouldn’t have eaten”), you skip the fries. For a beverage it is unsweetened iced tea or Diet Coke. So far, zero calories. All you need now is a sandwich. The bread isn’t really on the Atkins diet but otherwise a McDonald’s sandwich is vastly smaller and lower in calories than anything you’d get in an upscale restaurant. Best of all, the menu at McDonald’s won’t tempt you into excess. The sandwiches aren’t all that delicious. If you’re really hungry they can taste pretty good but have you ever been sad that you couldn’t order both the Big Mac and the Quarter Pound with Cheese?

Market opportunity: write a book entitled “The McDonald’s Diet” that explains how to lose 5 lbs/week eating only in McDonald’s.

[This is not a completely original idea, of course.  Don Gorske has been at it for 30 years, coincidentally only a few miles from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the site of the big airplane convention where this idea began to take shape.]

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My hosts here in Omaha, Nebraska have the September 1, 2003 Forbes magazine in their kitchen.  One quote that might amuse you…

There are three roads to ruin:
women, gambling, and technicians.
The most pleasant is with women,
the quickest is with gambling,
but the surest is with technicians.
— Georges Pompidou

(Of course, the French definition of a “technician” is more akin to what we would call a scientist, engineer, or “technologist”.)

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Bryce Canyon National Park is beautiful but, within any reasonable walking distance of a car, essentially urban.  In fact, given that nearly all of the conversations that one overhears are in French, Italian, or German, Bryce is positively cosmopolitan.  Wanting to explore the backcountry a bit without wearing out my feet, I drove SE on Utah Highway 12.  This is billed as “the most scenic highway in America” and seems to genuinely deserve the title.

After 15 minutes the sign for “Kodachrome Basin State Park” appeared.  This is a beautiful peaceful place with a good paved road all through it.  I figured I’d come back and bike around a bit after the mid-day heat wore off.  I pointed the rental Buick down Cottonwood Canyon Road, a 46-mile red dirt track that cuts nearly the way south to highway 89 to Page, Arizona.  This is Bureau of Land Management’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, created in 1996 by Bill Clinton.  The scenery is fantastic.  You can hike or mountain bike if you want to, even bring your dog.  But really the vistas are magnificent just viewed from the driver’s seat.

After a few miles the road went down to the bottom of a steep wide wash and forded a stream that was perhaps 10′ wide and 6″ deep.  I kept going.  A bit of rain started to fall.  Hmm…  rain in the desert.  That little tiny stream had sure cut a deep steep wash.  Maybe it got bigger after a rain.  Perhaps a lot bigger.  I turned the Buick around, resolving to get back across that stream before it had time to swell.  Before I’d gone back 1 mile the road liquified and became as slick as ice.  You couldn’t even walk on it without slipping.  I maneuvered the car to the right side of the road and shut down.  Ten minutes later two cars carrying 8 Dutch tourists came skidding sideways to a halt behind me.  They’d come all the way up from the south and were on their way to Bryce.  As the rain continued it seemed possible that we wouldn’t get out before the next morning.  I took an inventory of the trunk  tent, pad, sleeping bag, food, 3 gallons of water.  Could be worse.

After an hour the rain had stopped and the road was drying out.  The Dutch folks took off and I followed 15 minutes later.  I caught up to them at the little stream.  It was 25′ wide, maybe 3′ deep, and raging with a fast current.  Periodically a huge section of the stream’s canyon would fall away and collapsed into the stream with a loud noise and a substantial dust cloud.

We sat for an hour, watching people in SUVs and 4WD pickups approach from the other side of the stream, get out of their car to have a look, and make a U-turn back to the pavement.  The Dutch turned around and decided to drive back the way they’d come, a 150-mile detour if you wanted to get to Bryce.  Local rancher Jim Milne, his wife Christine, and dog Stubby, showed up every now and then on the opposite back in their white 4WD pickup to see if Christine’s dad was coming up from my side of the ford.  Three Navajo in a jacked-up red pickup truck came roaring in from Jim and Christine’s side of the stream.  It was about 1.5 hours after I’d arrived at the site and the flood waters had receded quite a bit.  They made it across uneventfully.  The water wasn’t much more than 1′ deep at this point but the banks of the ford were extremely muddy and had been cut much more steeply than when I’d crossed just a few hours earlier.

Jim brought a shovel out from his pickup and started to dig out the bank on his side.  “C’mon, gun her across and you’ll make it,” he encouraged.  The Buick slide down one bank, got some good footing on the rocks in the streambed, then foundered 95% of the way up the opposite bank.  I backed up into the stream and Jim did some more digging.  Christine suggested backing up farther and getting more of a running start.  The Buick made it on the second try.  The Navajo cheered, as did a couple of Canadian schoolteachers who’d stopped to watch.

When I finally got to the little town of Tropic, Utah the locals couldn’t help staring at the mud-covered rental car.  The Buick’s hood was drenched in mud.  I told my story and everyone in turn had a story of their own regarding that road.  One man had driven down there in 1983 and come upon a car up to its axles in sand.  The occupants had been stranded for three days, two of which were without water.  Others talked about a French couple that had gotten stuck in the snow back in January.  The man walked out and got help.  The woman died.  Rescuers found that they’d never figured out how to engage 4WD on their rental SUV.

Let’s review the Weather v. Philip..  Thursday: couldn’t land at Bryce due to thunderstorms; landed Cedar City instead.  Friday:  had to come away from overlooks in Cedar Breaks National Monument due to lightning strikes, stop the car for 20 minutes due to obscured visibility in heavy rain, and wait for 20 minutes to get around a washed-out portion of a road.  Saturday: got stuck for nearly 3 hours.  Weather: 3; Philip: 0.

A few snapshots from the experience: http://www.photo.net/philg/digiphotos/20030816-grand-staircase/

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… both like to summer on Martha’s Vineyard.  Check out Kyle’s blog for some photos of how a water-crazed Samoyed spends August.

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Like every other U.S. national park (and unlike Canadian parks), Bryce Canyon tries to make life tough for dogs and bicycles.  You can’t walk a Golden Retriever on a leash on a trail anywhere in the park, even on paved trails at overlooks.  In theory you can ride a bike from overlook to overlook but there are no racks in which to park or lock them (the National Park Service did get up enough energy to put fancy “no bikes” signs on all the paved trails to the overlooks so you can’t keep your bike with you).  Needless to say there are no trails specifically built for bikes or trails on which mountain bikes are allowed.  Basically the park is set up for driving SUVs or putting on a pack and hiking in without a dog.

Sound like a paradise for Sierra Club members?  Sure, as long as they love the smell of jet fuel in the morning.  I enjoyed a sightseeing ride in a turbine-powered Bell JetRanger this morning.  We screamed down into the canyon at 70 knots, perhaps 500′ over the tops of the trails and less than that over the tops of the hoodoos, well below the rim of the canyon.  I must come back on Monday morning and buzz the place in the Diamond Star before proceeding onward to Salt Lake City.

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